The Sunday after Thanksgiving has a particular texture to it: part exhale, part existential dread. We’ve survived the familial minefields, only to return to offices where we’ll inevitably be confronted with debriefs on dry turkey, the great cranberry sauce debate( canned loyalists vs. the homemade purists), and at least one tale of an uncle who made himself a little too familiar with the wine supply.
Whether you’re taxiing down a runway or already fused to your sofa, consider with your gentle interruption: we have new/. Big news. As you may have noticed, The Brief has arrived in a new format; cleaner, sharper, more intentional. And even better: our website is officially live.
We’d love to hear how the new Brief format is landing. There’s a quick survey at the end of this post. Our aim was simple: make your Sundays feel lighter, not more laborious. More clarity, less clutter.
In This Issue
This Week’s Pins
Beauty & Fashion
K-Beauty retail expansion in the US Korean cosmetics sales are expected to exceed $2 billion in 2025, up 37% from last year. K-Beauty tech RAFIQ raised $11.1 million in Series B for formulation tech advancement.
Merit Beauty Crosses $100m in net revenue with even split between wholesale and DTC after hiring former MAC CEO.
Mythereesa is getting a new CEO: former Christie’s Asia-Pacific president Francis Belin. Known for his command of the global high-net-worth client, Belin steps in as Mytheresa reports 12.2% YOY sales growth.
Ariana Grande X Swarovski drop a limited edition crystal capsule collection targeting younger, style-savvy audiences.
Cat Blanchett’s Uniqlo moment goes viral as the Cotton Standard Collar Shirt Jacket sells out after her appearance at MoMa’s LifeWear Day event.
Louis Vuitton X Takashi Murakami collaboration returns for a 20th anniversary re-edition collection celebrating their 2003 partnership.
Finance
Bain and Altagamma project the luxury sector will finally return to growth in 2026, rising 3-5% after two years of stagnation. Global luxury spending is expected to end 2025 essentially flat at €1.44 trillion, with personal luxury dipping 2% YOY to €358 billion.
Auction houses are successful courting younger collectors: at Sotheby’s, one third of luxury buyers are now under 40, while Phillips has seen its Gen Z and millennial clientele jump 56% in five years. Christie’s reports a similar surge, with millennials and Gen Z making up 39% of female buyers and 32% of male buyers so far in 2025.
Hanni secures $2 million led by Melitas Ventures to fuel Sephora expansion and body care line growth.
US luxury goods market projected to reach $196.16 billion by 2033 up from $115.22 billion in 2024 with6.09% CAGR.
Entertainment
The Golden State Warriors bring beauty curtsied with Sephora partnership, blending sports culture with the cosmetics giant’s reach. The collaboration marks a fresh play for fan engagement at the intersection of athletics, beauty, and retail.
Drama unfolds at Miss Universe 2025 in Bangkok with allegations of rigging and contestant walkouts.
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade delights viewership with heavily diverse performances including Shaggy, Cynthia Erivo and Native Pride Productions.
Fifteen Percent Pledge and Sephora launch 2026 Beauty Grant applications for Black-owned brands with $100k award.
The Algorithm
Shawn Johnson and Gia Guidice Win Special Forces as the final two standing on the military-style competition show. The show’s smallest contestants even outperformed Johnson’s husband, former NFL player Andrew East.
Wicked: For Good dominated the global box office with a record-breaking $233 million debut. The biggest opening ever for a musical adaptation.
Ralph Lauren aesthetic dominates the holidays. The bran’s quiet-luxury Americana has become the season’s unofficial mood board.
Luxury Gourmet food is moving home, with more consumers ordering gourmet meals through delivery apps instead of booking tables. High-end restaurants are meeting the demand, turning premium takeout into the newest expression of convenience-meets-indulgence culture.
CULTURAL INTEL
Gossip, Quantified.
The streets aren’t just talking anymore, they’re trading. Kalshi and Polymarket are rewriting the rulebook.
Prediction markets are having a moment. The kind that feels both deeply futuristic and unmistakably human. At their core, they’re platforms where people wager real money on real-world outcomes: elections, economic indicators, celebrity court cases, sports, even the weather. Instead of pundits or polls, they crowdsource probability. Just like the stock market, the more people believe something will happen, the higher the price of that outcome trades.
Right now, two platforms dominate the cultural and political imagination:
Polymarket: The Renegade Oracle
The buzzy, crypto-collateralized platform that is technically off-limits to U.S. users, Polymarket has become shorthand for high-volume political speculation. In the 2024 U.S. election cycle, it reportedly processed more than $400 million in trading volume on election-related markets alone, according to publicly viewable blockchain data. One New York mayoral market drew more than $420 million in volume, a number analysts debate but one that still signals sheer cultural scale.
Kalshi: The Institutional Twin
The federally regulated alternative, offers a buttoned-up, fully legal version of the same idea. Its 2024 election contract volumes exceeded $100 million, according to CFTC filings and company statements, cementing it as the sanctioned sibling in a now-mainstream industry.
In just a year, prediction markets have moved from niche internet hobby to a new kind of public metric. Polymarket odds now appear on LinkNYC kiosks. Google announced it will integrate Polymarket data into Google Finance. Newsrooms list Kalshi and Polymarket prices alongside polls. And of course, partisans have begun spinning conspiracy theories about “whales” manipulating the markets in their candidate’s favor…a coping mechanism equal parts Bloomberg Terminal and fan fiction.
But beneath the spectacle lies something more elemental: prediction markets aren’t replacing politics. They’re reflecting our desire for clarity in a chaotic system; the fantasy that numbers, not narratives, can tell us what happens next.
Suddenly, the gossip economy has a price tag.
Gossip as Collective Intelligence
There’s an old sociological truth: gossip is a form of distributed intelligence. Before dashboards and data visualizations, there were brunch tables, beauty salons, barstools, informal networks people used to read the future by reading each other. Who’s breaking up. Who’s getting fired. Who’s losing their grip.
Gossip is predictive because it’s social pattern-recognition disguised as entertainment.
Prediction markets simply take that implicit system and make it explicit.
If gossip is the intuition economy, Polymarket is the Bloomberg Terminal of girl-talk.
A prediction market forces people to put money behind their most mouthy opinions. As economist Justin Wolfers put it, prediction markets “turn disagreement into data.”
“I think he’ll cheat again” is gossip.
“I just risked $200 on it” is a signal.
The Bloombergification of Gossip
If gossip was the original predictive infrastructure, prediction markets are its industrialization. They convert social sentiment into financial stakes.
And the public is responding. In New York’s mayoral cycle, candidates reported supporters sending messages like: “I just put a thousand on you, please don’t let me down.” Politics becomes intimate when you literally have skin in the game.
Meanwhile, the platforms themselves have become media companies in real time. Kalshi and Polymarket post like low-trust financial meme accounts: clipped, breathless, dopamine-efficient. They’re not just reporting odds, they’re shaping the discourse.
This is how media ecosystems form: not from gravitas, but from engagement.
Gambling Ate Sports. Will It Eat Politics Next?
Sports didn’t merely absorb gambling; gambling subsumed sports. Fox Sports became the FanDuel Network. Broadcasts became tutorials in spreads and props. A casual conversation about the NFL is now a conversation about personal finance.
The question isn’t whether prediction markets will influence politics, they already do.
The question is whether political media will follow sports media into a future where odds are the story.
If more Americans bet on elections, coverage will shift accordingly.
Markets become narrative.
Volatility becomes content.
And political reality blurs with speculative financial reality.
We’re already drifting there:
Google integrating Polymarket into Finance
Truth Social launching its own prediction market
Local news publishing odds like weather reports
Election debates increasingly framed around “what the markets say”
It’s not impossible to imagine a Jubilee-style debate show, but about your bets, not your beliefs.
Truth vs. Volatility
Prediction markets sell themselves as sources of truth: stainless-steel, mathematically neutral, immune to rhetoric. But the business model complicates the story.
These platforms thrive on uncertainty.
Uncertainty drives volume.
Volume drives profit.
If Kalshi and Polymarket need money on both sides of a bet, isn’t murkiness, or at least the perception of it, good for business? They don’t need to manufacture misinformation; they just need the world to stay confusing enough to keep people trading.
Gossip works the same way. It thrives in the fog.
Prediction markets simply monetize it.
Welcome to the Probability Era
At their best, prediction markets offer clarity. The crowd’s collective intelligence, condensed. At their worst, they are volatility engines dressed in the language of transparency.
We used to say, “the streets are talking.”
Now the streets are quantifying.
And gossip finally has a ticker.
As always, thank you for sending part of you Sunday with us. If this new format feels like a gentler on-ramp into the week, that’s exactly the point. And if you want more of The Sixteenth, find us on Instagram for a steady stream of taste, culture and thoughtfulness.
